Sunday, December 22, 2013

Dern on top

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson called Bruce Dern
“one of the most striking actors on the screen, but a professional haunted by
failures, and a man whose own unease flowed into his querulous screen persona.”
He added that Dern “can be fearsome, loathsome, or pitiful, but he is neither
calm nor commanding.” In the fearless
kitchen of 1970’s cinema, these perhaps unpromising qualities nevertheless
brought Dern to the head table on plenty of occasions, with lead or strong supporting
roles in such memorable films as Silent
Running, The King of Marvin Gardens, Hitchcock’s last work Family Plot, and Coming Home (for which he got his only Oscar nomination to date). His
emblematic role may be as the cop in Walter Hill’s The Driver, in which he seems to have the time of his life with
outrageous dialogue, grandiosely asserting his own status as a winner, in
comparison to the fools and losers around him. The performance perfectly
embodies Thomson’s thesis: it’s a study in scarily self-righteous neediness,
pushed too far not to detect some queasy self-diagnosis on the actor’s part.

Nebraska

Despite the fine quality of those
movies and others, they’re clearly not on the decade’s very highest echelon,
and Dern has spoken of his regret at never getting the big break he hankered
for. As many of his peers marched on to richer if not necessarily artistically
superior times in the 80’s and 90’s, he ran quickly out of steam, and has been
in supporting parts for the best part of thirty years, seldom in very memorable
films. That would have seemed to be the end of the biography to all intents and
purposes, if not for Alexander Payne, who cast the actor in his new film Nebraska (although Payne’s first thought
was apparently of Gene Hackman, who declined to come out of retirement). Dern
won the best actor award at Cannes, and some of the recent year-end critics’
prizes as well, so another Oscar nomination seems fairly likely. Some have
suggested that the role might be regarded as either a lead or a supporting
role, and that Dern should angle to be placed in the latter category, on the
theory that it’s an easier road to the award, but the actor refused, on the
basis that this would mark him as “a whore” (still not calm, but finally
commanding).

It’s hard to imagine anyway why the
Academy would go for such a ploy, because he’s in the great majority of the
scenes in the film, and is plainly its dominant personality. He plays Woody, in
his late 70’s and no longer in great physical or mental shape, taking at face
value a dumb promotional flyer telling him he’s won a million dollars, and
obsessed with covering the thousand mile distance from Montana to Nebraska to
collect the supposed prize. His son David (Will Forte) eventually gives in and
agrees to drive him; after the old man injures himself along the way, they take
a detour to his home town, where most of his surviving relatives still live.
Woody’s supposed millionaire status makes him a local celebrity, while also
arousing the self-interest of family and so-called friends; it sounds like he’s
been a lifelong easy target for such manipulations.

American journey

Payne shot the film in pristine black
and white, punctuating it with visual postcards from the journey. There’s not
that much to see – highways, signs, old storefronts: depending on your
affection for American heartland myths, you might view the landscape as either
sparsely beautiful or else as rather wretched (a point made on a brief detour
to Mount Rushmore, where Woody can only focus on the imperfections). Something
similar goes for the people who populate the film, their lives defined almost
entirely by what and who they happened to find in their place of birth, which
isn’t much – time and again, it sounds like entire existences can be summed up
in alcohol, sex and cars; no one in the film comes close to expressing an
abstract idea. There’s also little sign of real romance or passion; an early
scene with David’s maybe-girlfriend confirms this absence persists across the
generations. It’s been suggested in the past that Payne ‘s precise observation
of such types isn’t that different from patronizing them, and the same might
certainly be said here, but perhaps this kind of ambiguity is by now the truest
response to the contours of the so-called heartland.

The film’s careful observation of these
people and places yields lots of striking moments, but it always feels like at
least one part fairy tale, and this is the part that ultimately triumphs; it’s
disappointing how the ending seems to throw away the economic plausibility
Payne’s been so scrupulous about up to that point (in this environment, a
million dollars still means a lot). He’s
generally regarded now as a leading American director, but I don’t really see
it. His best film
still seems to me, by a mile, to be the scintillating Election, a construction of graceful metaphorical and allusive
complexity.His last film, The
Descendants, certainly transcended normal dull craftsmanship, but it was hard to see what so
many people were swooning about. In a way, it’s easier to warm to Nebraska, if only because it’s
apparently conceived as a lesser project, and so it’s easier to take it as
such.

Hollywood
story

A lot of it’s in the casting. Forte is a quite inspired
choice; the worry in his eyes is in itself worth a barrel of nuance. June
Squibb, the little-known actress who plays Woody’s long-suffering wife, must be
a strong award contender herself, given the eternal appeal of old women acting
tough and talking dirty. Payne fills many of the small roles with people who
certainly feel unappealingly un-actorly; at other times, though, you feel he
might be daring us not merely to dismiss certain characters as lazy trash who you
just want to turn your back on (if so, I failed the test).

Anyway, for me it was always going to be much more about
Bruce Dern than anything else. He’s just about perfect in the role, but
unfortunately it’s not the same as saying it’s the perfect Bruce Dern role.
When people describe the younger Woody, it’s impossible to see how that
correlates with what we know of the younger Dern, and by the same token, you
can’t help wishing his career-capping performance was defined by great talk and
action rather than by stiffness and confusion. It’ll still be a great Hollywood
story if he wins the Oscar (although as a practical matter, I have no idea how
a voter should choose between the relative strengths of Dern and of kick-ass
contenders such as Robert Redford and Chiwetel Ejiofor) but it would be more
like him winning a late-career promotional sweepstakes than reaping the logical
rewards of his earlier great work.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).